Advice for Aspiring Swing Dance Teachers

Advice for aspiring swing dance teachers. Please see http://www.swingdoctors.org.uk for updates. Copyright © 2011, Jamie Davies. Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3; with the Invariant Sections (which must not be modified or deleted) being the logos, header and URL above, and this entire copyright paragraph. About these notes: These notes are intended to act as a brief vade mecum for anyone thinking of teaching swing dance. They assume that you are already an experienced and competent social dancer, and that you can lead and, ideally, follow. I writing this, I am absolutely not trying to set myself up as any kind of ‘authority’ on the subject. I have, however, been teaching Lindy Hop for about fifteen years, and Balboa, Shag, Charleston etc for about twelve. Based on this and other teaching, I have been elected to the UK’s Royal Society of Arts and the UNESCO International Council of Dance. I am, though, the first to admit that I still have a huge amount to learn about both dance and teaching. I just hope that this short document will help build the confidence of anyone who wants to give new people, and places, a change to get swing-dancing. Before you start - introspection and imagination Before you start, it may be sensible to ask yourself, honestly, what your motives are for wanting to teach in the first place. There are many possible motives, and I would not presume to say that some are better than others, but some possible motives may be addressed a better way. For example, if you want to teach mainly to be the centre of attention or to show off that you are such a great dancer, you may find competition gives you more of what you want, and more easily (especially since, when teaching is good, the students are the centre of attention, and when it is really good, they think they did it all for themselves). Either way, realize now that teaching (well) takes a lot of work, and patience, and may involve some unexpected drawbacks (such as making many dancers either nervous of dancing with you at all, or thinking that any social dance with their teacher has to be some kind of exam in which they have to throw at you any move you have ever taught them!). It can, however, be tremendously rewarding. Also before you start - a boring (but very important!) administrative detail So… assuming you still want to do this… you need to spend a few moments being pessimistic, in order to avoid serious worry later. The most frightening possibility is that someone in one of your classes will sustain a serious injury, will hold you responsible, and will sue you for an amount of money that looks more like a telephone number than an invoice. The world is getting more litigious: just one look at the shark lawyers’ advertisements on daytime television will convince you that this is now true even in the UK. Alas, no amount of pupils’ signatures on forms with phrases about teachers taking no responsibility for accidents will protect you under current law (that changed about 15 years ago). It also makes no difference at all if you are making a profit or teaching free of charge. Therefore, do not think of teaching without public liability insurance!! Also, do not assume that you are covered by a venue’s or group’s insurance – you probably won’t be, even if some barman at the venue says you are: remember it’s your money/house on the line, not his. Of course, if you perform, you probably already have public liability insurance: you will still need to let your insurers know you will be teaching, because your basic performance policy may not cover this. Where to start If you can, start by teaching advanced classes at an established dance venue, then head down through intermediate ones, attempting beginners’ ones last. This is the opposite of what most people do, because they think that the main source of difficulty in a class is the set of dance moves and technical points. It isn’t. When you are teaching an advanced class, you can take for granted that your pupils are committed, skilled at learning dance moves, they know all the basics thoroughly, and they are capable of improvising seamlessly to cover some point you never remembered to tell them explicitly (such as how to change hands, or how persuade the lady to change her weight, etc). They are also probably used to a great variety of teachers and styles. Advanced dancers can learn a lot from, and still enjoy, a class that is not actually very well taught (in fact, they may even gain more from it). When you are teaching a class of absolute beginners, you can take nothing for granted except for the fact the people in front of you have, for whatever reason, decided that they want to try learn the swing dance you are teaching (probably). They will have a huge range of learning speeds. Some may be very under- confident and in need of frequent encouragement and assurance, others may think they know it all already because they once did something vaguely like partner dancing at a school Disco ten years ago. Some may feel awkward about personal space and touching other people, especially strangers, while others may be so keen on ‘touching other people’ that this becomes a problem. Some will be shy about any mistakes and others may be very competitive. Some will have danced other styles before, and will know about leading and following, will be good at ‘seeing and doing’, dissociating motions in different parts of their bodies, and at knowing their left from their right. Others will have none of these skills, and will not even detect that their bodies are not doing what they think they are doing. All will be using their first lesson to decide what your classes are like. Are these evenings doing to be fun, friendly and confidence-boosting, or are they going to be hours spent in miserable, confidence-sapping confusion? Does the dance itself look fun or serious, social or competitive, worth learning or best avoided? In an absolute beginners’ class, you have to deal with all of this and more: the actual steps are the easy part. Having said this, if you are starting off lessons somewhere completely new, and you have no opportunity to give advanced classes first, then you just have to throw yourself in the deep-end. I hope that these notes help. Starting off with an Advanced/ Intermediate Class If you are able to start by teaching experienced dancers, you will either be teaching a group that knows you already, or one to whom you are strangers. Each has its advantages. Your home crowd will be friendly and supportive (hopefully), and you will have a really good idea of what they can already do, and the styles of teaching to which they have become used. On the other hand, they know you are of them, so you had better be very careful not to give yourself any airs and graces! An away crowd will be more of an unknown quantity, but since whoever invited you will have probably already ‘sold’ you to them, possibly giving a description of your skills so glowing that you do not recognize it as applying to you, they will usually be very willing to accept you as experts. You may not feel this is warranted (you will, after all, know what international stars are like, and you know you are not one of them!), but you can’t shrug it off completely without denting their confidence in you. If you are uncomfortable, deflect your expert status into something where you feel more comfortable (say your particular field is, for example, in teaching leader-follow communication on a social floor, or high-speed dance, or whatever fits well with what you will be doing). When you are introduced, your class will form their impression of you in about fifteen seconds – so think about what you will say, how extrovert you will be, the ‘fun’ or ‘seriousness’ of the class etc , beforehand. Whether teaching ‘home’ or ‘away’, plan your class beforehand! There are many ways of organizing a class, but the most common is probably to teach a routine. In the weaker kind of class, the teaching of a routine with fancy moves seems to be the main point. Better teachers, though, will have thought carefully about some particular principles of dance they want to get across, and the routine will be a vehicle for this. Examples of such principles, embedded in a routine, are; • Leading from the body • Conserving momentum/rotation between moves • Changing the rhythms in standard moves • Rounded and linear swingouts, and their natural variations (there are, of course, a zillion others). Having planned your class, having written a routine that fits some suitable music, you need to practice the routine so that you can demonstrate it before the lesson. If possible, plan a routine with a ‘false ending’ and a real one, so that if you run out of time you can stop at the first ending and it will still seem natural. If the moves are intricate, it may be useful to find another track that is slower and still fits, for teaching. Then, you need to work out how to break each move down to teach it (see section below).

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